All well and good for people who know how to do that
A lot of users won’t even know what a kernel is let alone why their printer has stopped working or that they need to raise a GitHub issue
These aren’t printer drivers, but drivers for a Meson coax NIC that hasn’t been in business for a decade type of thing.
Really popular old drivers stay for a loong time, like the floppy driver that just got removed last year.
Nobody needing a modern kernel is using a floppy drive.
You’re very mistaken if you think the kernel in your IoT device ever got updated beyond what it shipped with.